AND CIVILIAN DEFENSE,PRODUCTION: WINGS FOR THE NAVY

At Bethpage, Long Island, a trim new plane raced down
the runway, lifted, climbed up, up, up almost beyond hearing, then
peeled off into a grinding power-dive. Fresh off the assembly line,
another Grumman Avenger, the Navy's new, deadly torpedo plane, was in
the torturing rigors of its shakedown flight.

On the other side of the world, in the shell-blasted smoke-haze of the
Battle of the Coral Sea (see p. 18), swarms of bee-bodied Navy fighter
planes had just proved prime factors in the United Nations' decisive
victory. The planes were Grumman Wildcats,...